Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  I knew the air was gone, but I lifted my face to the sun, feeling the thin sunlight on my bare skin. The second sight remained to me, faint and far away at the edge of my perceptions, but it was enough, enough to choose to stand, enough to hold the effects of the vacuum at bay, if only for a little while. The future was lost to me, and the past was veiled. I was weaker without the Quiet to hand, but it had vanished, its time remote from ours, lost in the ever-changing wilderness of times yet unreal.

  But it was enough, enough to carry my exhausted body downslope toward the camp.

  And the army and the shuttles that waited there.

  CHAPTER 71

  WHISPERS

  I RAISED BARE HANDS and waved, signaling the troopers below. Someone would have to see me. I could not call to them, not in vacuum, and I would not don my mask again. Not yet. I wanted them to see my bare face. To see I was not dead. Whole Ibis-class landing shuttles squatted beyond the camp, their wings folded up like the points of a half dozen metal crowns. Valka must have called in the cavalry when I disappeared. But how long had I been gone?

  It took an effort of will to focus on the cresting wave of time, to hold myself along the narrow and increasingly unlikely line where I managed to stay alive. It was like balancing on a wire where I knew that any surprise, any disturbance would spell disaster. The Quiet had given me the gift of second sight, had opened my consciousness across the wave-space of quantum potential.

  They had seen me.

  Sparrowhawks wheeled overhead, and I—who had so often stood beneath their screaming flight—was transfixed by the silence of them. I saw a skiff speed forward—a low-slung thing like an ancient longship—men in white armor clinging to its gunwale. Three figures sped ahead of them, each riding chariots so that they seemed to fly, leaning against the handlebars, their feet in the platform stirrups.

  I recognized Valka leading them all, Crim and Pallino behind. I knew the former by his bandoleer of throwing knives and the latter by the high crest on his faceless helm.

  They pulled up before me, throttling their flight platforms back, repulsors throwing up clouds of dust. I smiled and waved, showing my face and bare hands. The skiff pulled up shortly thereafter, men looking on in wonder. Without my helmet on—I’d lost the bone conduction patch somewhere in my agony on the mountain—I could hear no word that passed between them.

  Valka slowed as she ran toward me, as if unsure it was really me. Smiling, I presented my scarred left hand, showing her Aranata’s ring and the ivory band I wore in her honor.

  She closed the gap between us, and threw her arms about my neck. My vision wavered, focus scattering. I gasped, and with an effort of will mastered myself once more. Long enough. Just long enough to key the button on my suit’s arm. I could do nothing for my hands, but the mask closed over my face and I felt cool, sterile air blow across my face.

  The jets shattered my concentration, and the Quiet’s sight collapsed. Immediately I felt cold seep into my hands. “And they say I am a witch,” Valka’s voice sounded in my ear. “How in the hell—your hands!” She was surveying me at arm’s length as she spoke, and reached down, taking my bare hands in hers.

  The suit had tightened around my wrists long ago, maintaining pressure elsewhere, but the flesh of my hands was pockmarked where capillaries had burst.

  “Lost my gloves,” I managed to say . . . and swooned almost to death.

  * * *

  Medica again. Corrective tape on my fingers. The antiseptic odor of curative balms. Feeding tubes. A saline drip. The beep beep beep of vital monitors. Dr. Okoyo’s stern countenance. Valka’s hand.

  I awoke, and was surprised to find that I was in medica no longer. I was in my own bed, staring at the ceiling. My limbs were weak and watery, but moved when I willed them to. I held my hands up. The damaged capillaries had nearly healed. Only faint pink spots remained. Everything ached, though whether that was from the power or from the starvation and exhaustion I’d experienced on the mountain I was unsure.

  Nevertheless, I sat up and swung my legs round to the floor.

  After everything I had seen, the familiar lines of floor and furniture seemed hellish and unreal. I held my face in my hands, remembering those other faces, those other Hadrians. Thousands upon thousands of them, but two above all: that fey man giving orders on the Demiurge; and the old man in chains. Was there no other choice? Kill billions—man and Cielcin alike—or watch everyone I cared for die? The Prophet clapped its hands, the dry snap of them like the slamming of a guillotine. Still seated on the edge of the bed, I tried to turn my sight once more in that other direction. Vague images of myself sprawled on the bed in a million aspects flashed across my mind. It took me a moment to realize what was missing. I couldn’t see any of the narratives where I slept, could only see what my eyes saw, only sense what my senses knew.

  “Hadrian?”

  Light fell in the opening door and painted a woman’s silhouette and shadow on my world. I let the visions fade, and looked up at Valka.

  “Okoyo said you’d be awake about now,” she said. “She timed your medication.”

  “I feel awful,” I said, and made to stand.

  She caught me and forced me to sit back down. “What happened to you?” she asked.

  Suddenly I was the ocean, and she the wine cup. I looked down at my hands, the healing capillaries, the scars that would never fully heal. Trying to find the words, I twisted Aranata’s and the Emperor’s rings in turn. At last I said, “I . . . met the Quiet.”

  I could feel the weight of her eyes. “I know.”

  “You know?”

  “Hadrian,” she said, “you were gone for forty days.”

  “I . . . what?” I looked back at her, and saw her again for the first time. Her hair was mussed and unwashed, and there were dark shadows beneath the artificial eyes. “Forty . . . that’s not possible.” I looked back down at my hands, ticked off the days on my fingers. “I didn’t eat.”

  Valka sank onto the ottoman before an antique leather armchair I’d had bolted to the floor. “The moment you disappeared, I knew,” she said. “I waved Otavia and had half a chiliad flown down here to start canvassing the ruins.”

  “I wasn’t in them,” I said, massaging the deep scars in my left palm.

  “I know that, too,” she said. “We’d have found you.” Glancing up, I marked just how she’d mirrored my posture, the hands between her knees, shoulders hunched, eyes downcast. “We checked your suit chronometer. It said it was only three days since I lost you.”

  “Three days . . .” I repeated. That felt right. I remembered the sun setting on the mountaintop at least once. I couldn’t recall just how long Annica’s days were then. Longer than Earth standard, that was certain. Was it possible the rate of what we call time ran differently between narrative worlds? Or is it rather that time has no rate at all, and that the drift I’d experienced occurred simply because the two Annicas I had visited were separate from one another, as if I were a seaman gone ashore while his crew drifted at anchor by night?

  “What happened?” Valka asked again.

  “I . . . this is going to sound insane,” I said.

  Valka laughed. “I just saw you standing without a helmet in vacuum,” she said. “Alive. I want the truth, Hadrian. All of it.”

  I found myself nodding. “I’ll tell you,” I said. “I’ll tell you.” I started at the beginning, from the moment she’d disappeared around the bend in the hall. I carried her across the bridge and up the new mountain in the shadow of those watchful faces.

  “Were they human faces?” Valka asked.

  This ground me to a halt. “I . . . yes.” I hadn’t even stopped to think about it at the time.

  A frown carved itself deep upon her sharp features. “Why would that be?” But she waved herself down. “Later.”

  We climbed the mountain together, and she was
silent through the whole narration. Not challenging me as she once had, not calling me a charlatan or a liar, not thinking I insulted her. How far we’d come. I told her of my visions, of the murdered sun, of the Watchers and the birth of the Quiet, of the end of time itself and of our smallest part in that tapestry. Of Akterumu and of the artificial eclipse of the sun.

  Of the Prophet, the Prince of the Princes of Hell. And the slaughter at its feast.

  “Was I there?” she asked.

  “I . . .” I had to think about it, had to re-examine those awful visions. “No.”

  I could not read the expression on her face. “ ’Twill be all right,” she said. “ ’Twill only happen if you fail, you think?”

  I could only nod.

  “Then we should make for Berenike at once,” she said.

  “You believe me?” I heard the surprise in my voice, and felt shame rise, chasing after it.

  Valka was on her feet by then, and closed the distance between us. Fingers lifted my chin. “I saw you die, remember?” She brushed my forehead with dry lips. “How can I deny what I’ve seen? With my eyes?” She tapped one ceramic globe with a fingernail, making me wince. “I’ll help you get dressed.”

  “There’s more!” I said, flexing my healing hands. “They aren’t a language.”

  Until that moment, I’d not been sure if I was going to tell her or not. It almost seemed cruel. But I had decided it was far crueler to know and never say.

  She’d crossed to the closet, had slid the door back into the wall. “What?”

  I smiled up at where she leaned against the frame, racks of clothing and shelves behind her. There was no easy way to say it. “The anaglyphs. They’re not part of a language at all. They’re part of a machine. The ruins . . . the ruins are empty because they were never filled. They’re not cities at all. They’re . . .” I laughed weakly. “They’re a labyrinth.” I waved this dramatic distraction aside. “They’re a machine that reaches into higher dimensions. The glyphs are components.” I told her about my return through the monolith, how the glyphs had rotated and built a door from the black matter of the stone. “Some of it might even be on the suit cameras.”

  Valka didn’t move. “ ’Twas nothing,” she said, a flatness in her tone somewhere between anger and disbelief. “Almost nothing. Your feed went dead the moment you walked out on this bridge of yours. It didn’t resume until you put your helmet back on. ’Tis like your suit was dead.”

  “Take off your mask . . .” I muttered.

  “What?”

  “The Quiet . . .” I said. “It ordered me to take my mask off.” My mind went to old stories about gods commanding men to cast aside their garments, their shoes. All the things of the world we’d made to hide our nakedness. All our technology. Our progress.

  “You think it was trying to hide the evidence?” Valka asked.

  “Perhaps . . .” I was stumbling toward an answer . . . “Perhaps it cannot exist when observed. Like . . . like how light changes when you look at it with instrumentation. Particles and waves.” I stood, head swimming, and Valka lurched forward to help steady me. “Maybe that’s why it never appeared to me when you were there. It could shut off the suit, but it couldn’t—wouldn’t shut off your eyes.”

  Valka was shaking where she held me. Tears? But no. Not Valka. Whether it was fear that moved her or rage, I cannot say. I did not ask. She was not a woman to describe her emotions. She suffered them, and needed only for me to stand there, calm. After a moment, she inhaled sharply. “Right,” she said. “What are you going to tell them?”

  I could only shrug. “The truth.”

  * * *

  I’d found the gentleman’s cane I’d carried to the triumph ball in a corner of our closet, and leaned heavily upon it as the bulkhead doors to the bridge cycled open. The metal nib tapped too loud against the decking as Valka escorted me over the threshold.

  “Commandant’s on the bridge!” exclaimed one ensign, as he had a thousand times before.

  I was back in the waking world.

  All eyes turned to face me, and I was made sharply aware of my disheveled appearance, the unbelted tunic, the long coat—so like the one I’d ruined climbing the mountain—and the cane. Self-conscious, I tucked my scarred left hand into my pocket.

  “Should you be out of bed, my lord?” asked Lieutenant Koskinen, hurrying forward.

  “I’m fine!” I said, a touch too sharply. I addressed Corvo and Durand. “I have what I came here for. We should chart a course for Berenike at once.”

  Corvo crossed powerful arms. “What happened?”

  Repeating a portion of what I’d said to Valka earlier, I said, “I met the Quiet.”

  “The Quiet?” Durand said, incredulous. “These alien gods of yours?”

  “Yes,” I snapped, impatience winning over politic comport.

  The first officer half-turned. “You really think you’re some kind of prophet?”

  No one spoke for a good ten seconds, shocked by the Norman’s words. Coming from officious, professional Bastien, even I was surprised. Surprised, and stung by the word prophet, thinking once more of Dorayaica. “We have to go to Berenike.”

  Durand wheeled. “So we came here to learn what we already knew?”

  “Dorayaica will be there,” I said, and that brought a chill over the proceedings, even over Durand’s crackling rage. “We have to stop it.” In all the futures I had seen, I could not recall seeing the battle at Berenike. Neither victory nor defeat. The visions I’d seen had left me blind in this. I stopped short of telling them about the futures I had seen. About the destruction of the Cielcin, about the Demiurge, or about the future where I failed to take that option and lost everything. I saw my faces reflected in the dark walls of the bridge, the old man in chains and the long-haired hero calling for blood.

  No.

  “Dorayaica,” Aristedes asked, rising from his seat near the captain’s console. “You’re sure.”

  I nodded.

  “We’re still no better off than we were,” Durand said. “We knew a fight was coming. That’s why staying here was a mistake.”

  “But we know when,” I said, realizing that I knew and wondering what else had seeped into the dark matter of my brain during my time on the mountain. “I need to get word to Legion Intelligence. I’ll send a telegraph as soon as we’re underway. They need to summon reinforcements. Every ship that can be spared should chart a course for Berenike.”

  Durand wasn’t finished. “This is what we sailed all the way here for? Reinforcements? That’s hardly prize-winning strategy, my lord.”

  “Enough!” I snapped, and extended a hand. I had no time for a second Bassander Lin. “Give me your sidearm, commander.”

  Bastien Durand twitched.

  “What?” Corvo stepped between us. “Hadrian, what are you doing?”

  I ignored the captain. “Your sidearm, Commander Durand. Please.”

  Cautious, the Norman officer removed his spectacles and advanced a step, removing his pistol from its thigh holster. As a bridge officer, he was one of the few personnel aboard the Tamerlane permitted to go armed when we were not at battle stations. I had left my sword in my quarters. No matter, a sword was not showy enough for what I had in mind. I took the weapon from him, turned it over in my hand. It was heavier than I expected. Not a phase disruptor or plasma burner, but a short-barreled MAG thrower, a high-acceleration, small-caliber railgun. It wasn’t Legion regulation; the pellets it threw were too risky aboard a starship, might break a line or pierce the hull in the wrong place. The one-time mercenary had apparently—for once in his life—ignored the letter of the law to suit his comfort and preference.

  It was perfect for my purposes.

  I found the safety and disengaged it. “Come here,” I said, gesturing to the commander, who had stepped back.

  “Hadrian,
what are you doing?” Corvo asked again.

  “I said, come here, Bastien.” As I spoke, I unbuttoned the left side of my tunic to bare my chest. Behind me was only a holograph plate mounted to the bulkhead—I held the muzzle of the weapon to my sternum, and taking Bastien’s hand in mine, squeezed his finger over the trigger. Valka screamed and stepped forward.

  Neither she nor Corvo had the time to stop me.

  The railgun whined and snapped as it fired. The holograph plate behind me shattered as the tungsten rod broke to pieces on the heavy bulkhead, shrapnel flying. Men surged forward to pull Durand off of me, to call for the doctor.

  “I’m fine,” I said. I released Durand’s grip—he dropped the gun and staggered back into the arms of two junior officers, eyes wide, hands shaking. I brushed one hand over my unmarked chest, letting my vision fade. There were any number of alternative spaces where Durand never fired. Any number of Hadrians who were never shot. My consciousness spread with my vision across those infinite parallels, and I had traded one for another even as the bullet ripped through me.

  Unharmed.

  “Do you believe now?” I asked coldly. I took a step nearer and pounded the cane once against the ground. “Does anyone else have doubts?”

  All eyes were wide but for Lorian’s. The little man was prodding through the damaged projector plate with a finger, already testing that it was real.

  “You really can’t be killed,” Corvo said.

  “I can,” I said. It had taken an effort of will to hold that power in my hands. “But not so easily as the rest of you.”

  Consciousness, I think, is a mechanism we humans have evolved for sorting the threads of time. We do it blindly, and that is enough for most of us, most of the time. I am no different, save that I have learned to listen.